i just listened to a message called “fear of failure” preached by craig groeschel online. about halfway in, he told this story:
there was an art professor who did a similar teaching activity with every new pottery class he had. he would break up the class into two groups. one group he would instruct to focus on quantity, to try and make a hundred pots. the other group he would tell to focus on quality, to make the best pot they possibly could. on your mark, get set, go.
and every year, in every class, the teacher would prove his point. at the end of the period, the students who focused on quality would have made just one pot. and those who focused on quantity would have made a hundred or so. and there would always be about a dozen or so from that group that were better than the pots from the quality group.
the students would ask, “why is that?” and he would respond: “often times we over-analyze, we over-prepare, we are too afraid to take a risk.” then he would say to the other group: “your first pot was ugly. your second pot was ugly as well. and your third pot wasn’t very good. but each time you tried, you learned something. and pretty soon, you had learned so much that the quality of your work improved, because you didn’t fear failure.”
what are you scared of? what do you think you should do, but scares you too much to do? what do you feel god calling you to do, but it just seems way too big or too impossible ever to achieve it? you are going to fail at some stuff. don’t fear it. learn to embrace failure as a learning tool. let your failures teach you things about how to better do what you’re trying to do!
Posted on November 24th, 2008 by deWeb
Filed under: Uncategorized
